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wenz0120: January 2012 Archives

"We can't always trust our common sense" is a statement I found very interesting in the first chapter. I found this interesting because most of the time our first instinct is to trust our common sense. The book gave some examples of well-known proverbs that deal with human behavior. Two examples are: absence makes the heart grow fonder and out of sight, out of mind. At first glance the majority of people agree with these two statements, but when looking at them more closely, they contradict each other. This shows a good example of why common sense cannot be trusted in psychology. People seem to rely on common sense because we are reliable to naïve realism, which is the belief that the world is perceived exactly how it is. We are taught to trust our perceptions in everyday life, so it is a big change to steer away from this the majority of the time while studying psychology. I think knowing when to trust common sense and when not to is going to be difficult throughout this course because a small percentage of the time it is acceptable to trust common sense in psychology. An example of when common sense is right is, "most people believe that happy employees tend to be more productive on the job than unhappy employees, and research shows that they're right" (Lilienfeld, 5). I have attached a picture of a man not using his common sense.